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Alice Pung's memoir Unpolished Gem (originally published in 2006) is certainly an interesting book. It tells the story of Pung and her family as they fled from Cambodia (which was enveloped in Civil War and genocide) and went to Australia. The...

Ruth Ware's The Woman in Cabin 10 (published in 2016) tells the story of a journalist named Lo Blacklock who is given an assignment many journalists can only dream of -- a week on a luxury cruise that has only a few people on it. When she first...

Regarded as one of the best memoirs ever about World War II, E.B. Sledge's With the Old Breed (published in 1981, over 35 years after he fought in the Pacific). Sledge began to write the memoir in 1944 based off the notes he took during battle. It...

Written by English author and poet Thomas Hardy, "A Wife in London" is Hardy's bleak and dreary anti-war poem crafted two months after the start of the bloody Second Boer War (1899 through 1902). Hardy, a Brit, was alarmed with his country's...

Best known for his poems about the Central Coast of California, Robinson Jeffers poetic career spanned over six decades, from the 1890's until his death in 1965. The peak of his career, however, was from 1920s through the 1930s. Among his most...

Maybe I'll Come Home in the Spring debuted on the ABC television network on February 16, 1971, as their Movie of the Week. It was a movie made specifically for television, and told the story of two young women, sisters Denise and Susie Miller, who...

There are twelve characters in Carol Shields' collection of short stories and the carnival that they are all dressing up for is a metaphor for life. Each of the characters lives an illusory life and they tend to wear or carry things that tell the...

Irish author Edna O'Brien originally intended her first novel, The Country Girls to be a trilogy; the novel, first published as one book with three distinct parts, was first published as a single volume in 1986, but had been published more than...

The Vita Nova is the first work attributed to Dante. It is a prosimeter (a genre that combines prose sections and verse compositions) that contains 31 lyrics and has a narrative framework of 42 chapters.

The work has been in circulation since the...

Molly's Game (2017) tells the true story of a woman named Molly Bloom who went from world-class Olympic level skier to illegal poker game organizer after a devastating injury in a qualifying event for the 2002 Winter Olympics. As her game grows...

H Is for Hawk (published in 2014), is author Helen Macdonald's memoir. Set over a period of a year, Macdonald chronicles the time she spent training a northern goshawk after the death of her father, whom she loved dearly (her father, by the way,...

Edith Mary Pargeter (born in 1913, died in 1995) was an English writer, especially known for historical fiction as well as her murder mysteries. Through her popular historical crime series featuring a Benedictine monk in the 12th century, Pargeter...

Alfred Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train (released in 1951) tells the story of two strangers who initially meet on a train headed to Washington D.C. One man, Bruno, is a charismatic and charming psychopath; the other, Guy, is a tennis player. Bruno...

Written by actor and playwright Sam Shepard, Curse of the Starving Class (1977) examines a family tragedy. Set in a farmhouse in the Western United States, follows an interesting family. Although they have enough to eat, they don't have enough to...

The Naga's Journey is set in modern-day Bangkok, a city that is degenerating rapidly, both morally, in its acceptance of a flourishing sex trade, and physically, under constant threat of a flood of such great magnitude that its potential for...

Bhasa is one of the most celebrated Indian playwrights writing in Sanskrit, an ancient language used for the majority of early Hindu and Buddhist spiritual and philosophical texts. Although the precise dates of his life and work are not known,...

A graphic novel by cartoonist David Mazzucchelli, Asterios Polyp (2009) tells the story of the eponymous Asterios Polyp, a professor from Cornell University in New York. After a sudden lightning strike destroys his apartment, Polyp takes up...

Director Rachel Lears began to work on the film that became Knock Down the House the day after Donald J. Trump won the office of the President of the United States. The film follows four Democratic candidates: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez from New...

The White Helmets is a short documentary film released in 2016, following the daily lives of the Syrian Civil Defence, who are nicknamed the White Helmets. Each of these men is a volunteer who becomes part of a team that focuses on medical...

Satellites is a play by critically acclaimed playwright Diana Son. Commissioned by the Public Theater, it was presented in the 2004 “New Work Now!” which recognized works from emerging or established playwrights. The play opened on June 18, 2006....

The 2000 Japanese dystopian thriller Battle Royale was based on the novel of the same name that was written in 1999 by Japanese journalist Koushun Takami. It follows the story of a group of junior high schoolers who live in a Japan governed by a...

Directed by Hassan Fazili, Midnight Traveler is, at its core, a documentary about refugees -- most prominently about the films director, Hassan Fazili. After the terrorist group The Taliban puts a bounty out on Fazili and his family's head, they...

Written as a series of periodical essays from 1867 to 1868 and published in Cornhill Magazine, Matthew Arnold's Culture and Anarchy was collected as a book in 1869. In the book, Arnold examines Victorian culture in England. He questions how...

There are only three characters in The Drawer Boy, a two-act play by Michael Healey. It is set in Clinton, Ontario, in 1972; the village is a small community that was founded in 1831 close to Lake Huron. The play's plot centers around the owners...